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The Boston-based entrepreneur who created the Sam Adams Lager has long been a master of
beer, and
he has become an expert in how to grow a business. He has transformed a
kitchen-table venture into a 950-employee company which had
total revenues of almost $630 million in 2012.

In the very early days, Koch was continually turned down by
traditional banks when he applied for loans and he struggled to get a
distributor interested in his craft brew. To support young entrepreneurs, The Boston Beer Co. launched a program
providing microloans and counseling to small food, beverage
and hospitality companies considered unbankable by traditional
lenders.

The program, Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream,
is expanding this year. This week, Boston Beer announced that
it is committed to providing an additional $1 million in
microloans
to 100 new small-businesses, on top of the $2 million that it
has already lent out since the program's inception in 2008.
Also this year, the program will solicit donations from draft
beer sales at participating bars and will increase its skills
coaching for entrepreneurs looking to pitch their food or
beverage to large retailers and restaurants.

As part of the initiative, Boston Beer hosts speed coaching
sessions across the U.S. where approximately 50 entrepreneurs
meet at local community centers or restaurants to get advice and
support for pain points in their business growth. Specialists
from within Boston Beer and expert volunteers meet with
small-business owners 20 minutes at a time to talk through
problems and solutions.

Koch is on hand at the speed coaching sessions, and his area of
expertise is growth management. After 29 years at the
helm of the brewhouse, Koch has learned a few lessons of how
to grow a business sustainably. Here are the three pieces of
advice he gives out the most frequently to entrepreneurs.

The larger and more profitable your business becomes, the more
focused you should become on the ingredients in and production of
your product. "As you grow, you should get better," says Koch.
Even as Sam Adams grew into the largest-selling craft brew in the
U.S., its primary focus has always been the quality of the beer
it brews.

Cash-strapped startups may not be able to afford the highest
quality ingredients or the best equipment right off the bat, but
as you begin to make money, reinvest in your process, he says.
"Don't take your eye off the product," says Koch.

Especially in the earliest days of your company, don't bring on a
new employee from a place of desperation
because you feel overwhelmed and need more hands. "If you are
three people and you go to four, that changes the character of
your company," Koch says. If a new employee is not working out
for your company culture, let them go quickly. The smaller a
team is, the less it can afford to carry unproductive
employees, he says.

To find the right candidate, interviewing employees is not
enough. Look beyond a resume. "When we started at Sam Adams, we
almost never hired people from the beer business because they
have too many bad habits," Koch says. Instead, he was looking for
individuals with the behaviors, talents and motivations that
would make them trainable.

Koch recommends offering to pay a potential new hire to work
alongside you for a day to help you evaluate the candidate's
personality and skills. "What we have learned is that if people
truly enjoy doing the things that they will need to do well to be
successful in a job, they will succeed. If they enjoy those
things. If they don't, it is not going to have a good outcome,"
he says.

"Nobody loves your product better than you do. Nobody is more
passionate about it. You are going to be -- like it or not -- you
are going to be the best salesperson for the product," says Koch.
Almost three decades ago, when Koch was getting Sam Adams off the
ground, he went from bar to bar with cold beer in his briefcase
selling his brew to bartenders. "I had never sold anything in my
life, I was scared to death."

Koch didn't know how to sell effectively, and he was turned off
by the typical salesman role models he knew of, namely used-car
salesmen or Willy Loman, the main character of Arthur Miller's
"tragedy of the common man," Death of a Salesman. Over
time, Koch learned that selling is really about figuring out how
your product can solve a customer's problems.

With Sam Adams, Koch pitched Bostonian bartenders by telling them
that they could sell Sam Adams for 50 cents more than a regular
beer but it only cost them 40 cents more to buy. Also, a craft
brew on the menu makes a restaurant or bar an attraction for
consumers, he told bartenders. "Once you get to the win-win,
selling is easy," Koch says.